Migrating and modernizing your application and moving to the cloud can be a really fun and interesting challenge. You can learn a lot through looking at solutions and architectures. But, If anyone tells you that migrating applications is “easy,” you probably stop listening immediately. The tools might be easy to use, but application migration is never instant, never just a clean one-and-done kind of adventure. It can be daunting to even know what tools to try out. We can make it easier for you and help you experiment. Here are my top four Google Cloud tips on how to make your migration journey a bit easier that you (probably) didn’t know about.

Modern developer experience: Try Anthos without buying Anthos, or anything else

Anthos is Google Cloud’s platform to build and manage distributed infrastructure and services. You want a bunch of cloud native services plus Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)? Then you want Anthos. You can run it in a lot of places including other major clouds and on prem, not just on Google Cloud.

However, taking on a full Anthos deployment can be daunting and what the heck is it anyway? Sure you can learn about it in our great videos. But wouldn’t you rather just try it? Back in November, in order to help people try out Anthos we announced the Anthos Developer Sandbox. All you need is a Google account. That’s it, you don’t even need a credit card. Bonus you get to try out Cloud Build.

You can ask Mike Coleman about this at his upcoming live Getting Started with Anthos event on Feb. 18 from 9-10am PST.

Migrate VM-based workloads to Kubernetes: Use Migrate for Anthos without buying Anthos

Migrate for Anthos lets you extract, migrate and modernize your existing applications. Sure you COULD rebuild the whole application, or manually refactor a monolithic application to run in containers. But if you don’t have the time or inclination, or you have a bunch of apps you need to move over, Migrate for Anthos helps you do that.

What you may not know is that Migrate for Anthos is provided free of charge, and can be used to migrate apps to GKE as well as to Anthos.

If you want to know more about Migrate for Anthos, check out these videos we just released:

• Intro to Migrate for Anthos
• Migrating Linux applications with Migrate for Anthos
• Migrating Windows applications with Migrate for Anthos

Migrate platforms: Use Kf for a Cloud Foundry experience on Kubernetes

Cloud Foundry is a popular open source PaaS platform and has a great developer experience. Migrating developers to a new platform isn’t just about the tech. It’s also about infrastructure and development workflows and practices. It can be really disruptive, particularly if you have application development workflows that really work for you. To address this problem for Cloud Foundry developers we created Kf. You can use Kf in place of many Cloud Foundry cf commands. Platform engineers can migrate the platform to Google Kubernetes Engine and take advantage of all the declarative infrastructure goodness that GKE gives you.  All with minimal disruption to developers who love Cloud Foundry.

Migrate databases: Database Migration Service makes migration easier

Moving to a fully managed database, such as Cloud SQL, can help you reduce maintenance costs and downtime. And, it provides easier integration with our other Cloud Services. Data migration is one of the more complicated aspects of moving applications.

We recently released Database Migration Service to preview. Migrating a MySQL database—and soon Postgres and SQL Server—to Cloud SQL is now easier. Check out this form to request access.

Preparing a database for migration is an important step, and part of what makes this “easier” and not “easy.” Check out these posts detailing more on how to prepare and to use DMS, and this video introducing the service.

Where to go from here

Migrations are never easy, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And every new tool takes some evaluation, some testing. Hopefully these tips can help you smooth over some of the rougher steps, make the jump to a new platform easier.

For more thoughts, check out the: Getting Started with Anthos event on Feb. 18 from 9-10am PST as a great place to get started, and check out some of the following resources:

• More events at Cloud OnAir
• The GCP Podcast
• The Kubernetes Podcast from Google
• And of course our YouTube channel